Elementary

It’s May 22 and it’s no mystery that it is Sherlock Holmes Day. It is surely no mere coincidence falls that this celebration falls on the birthday of the man who created him, author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

We can all debate whether Robert Downey Jnr or Benedict Cumberbatch or Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary makes the best Sherlock (I’m most definitely Team Downey Jnr) but there is little debate that there have been an awful lot of Sherlock movies – last count by 226 according to today’s Tech Times.

Thank goodness the Tech Times was on hand to share some other things you may not know about our favourite detective. Here’s six…..

His name was originally “Sherrinford” and only later changed to “Sherlock. Seems Sherlock was the name of a famous cricket player and Conan Doyle was a bit of a cricket tragic.

Sherlock’s assistant, Watson, was named Ormond Sacker in early drafts of the stories. Glad that was changed because “Elementary my dear Sacker” simply doesn’t work for me.

Sherlock never wore the famous deerstalker hat in Doyle’s works. The cap actually came from illustrations by artist Sidney Paget that appeared with the short stories in Strand magazine in the late 1800s. Not that I knew it at the time, but this vindicates my decision not to go with a silhouette deerstalker motive in my wrap. Way too obvious.

Sherlock did say “Elementay” several times in the novels and “My Dear Watson” but the combined phrase did not appear until a 1915 piece by P.G. Woodhouse.

Mycroft, the famous detective’s brother only appeared in two stories, The Greek Interpreter and The Bruce-Partington Plans. He briefly gets mentioned in two other books.

Many of us assume that Dr Watson narrates all the Holmes stories but there are four that told from a different point of view. Two stories occur in the third person, while Doyle wrote the other two from Holmes’ own perspective.

I had a good think about a Sherlock wrap from my own perspective. When I think Sherlock, I will admit that I do think deerstalker and cape and pipe and magnifying glass ( sidebar – do you know how hard it is to find a genuine magnifying glass? It’s hard and I will be blowed if I was going to pay nearly $30 for an ineffectual toy plastic one).

But I also think hounds-tooth pattern. So I went on a hounds-tooth hunt and quickly landed on a heavy weave in browns and the deepest of blues. Very British and just a bit olde worlde and with a strong paper like this (or any other really strongly patterned paper) you don’t need a lot more. No ribbon for Sherlock – but certainly a hint of a manly man knot – that like his adventures could unravel at any time. I’ve placed it against the London page of my much cherished Children’s Atlas of Major Cities. I am not quite sure why there is a penguin in the background on the London page of the City Atlas – guess we might need someone to help us solve that particular mystery.